1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a program, method and apparatus for generating fill-in-the-blank test questions by replacing a portion of a presentation material such as a slide used for a lecture with blanks, and more particularly, to a program, method and apparatus for automatically generating fill-in-the-blank test questions by coordinating with a video of a lecture using a pointing tool such as a laser pointer for the presentation material.
2. Description of the Related Art
In fields of in-company training and a general education, e-learning is increasingly introduced. The e-learning is a remote-area education using the internet and is often performed using a web screen. Since a lecturer cannot check reactions of students in the e-learning, a test is usually conducted on the web screen after the learning on the web screen. In order to generate the web test content, a large amount of man-hours is needed since the content is generated by an expert who understands details of the content with consideration of importance of the details. On the other hand, in the web content in the form of using a lecture video, a lecturer usually spends more time describing an important portion during shooting of the lecture. If the important portion described for a longer time can be automatically extracted from the material used in the lecture, test questions can be automatically generated.
The following is known as prior art for generating such fill-in-the-blank test questions.
(1) After any characters of a document shown on a screen are turned to unprinted characters with simple operation of a pointing device, the unprinted characters are displayed and checked with simple operation.
(2) A region of a target character string for rote learning is specified from a displayed document with a rote-learning assistance apparatus and a medium pen storing a rote-learning assistance program.
(3) With a mask edit unit, without editing (changing) an educational material which already exist, apparent changes can be made by performing mask setting to any regions of the educational material only for any time period (patent document 3). Therefore, while enhancing reusability, mask-style questions can be easily generated and a learner can make apparent changes without editing the educational material.
(4) For example, if “Succeeding Nobnaga Oda, Hideyoshi Toyotomi destroyed Hojo-shi in Odawara and dominated the whole country in 1590” is input as a learning target sentence, words with word-class information of personal names, place names and numeric characters are randomly selected from this sentence to automatically generate a question sentence, answer fields and right answers of fill-in-the-blank questions. Therefore, a workload for generating questions can be reduced and, if a learner studies using this apparatus, a practical ability can be obtained and a learning effect can be expected.
However, in such conventional fill-in-the-blank test question generation, a user specifies fill-in-the-blank portions manually while watching a screen and fill-in-the-blank test questions are not automatically generated. In (1), only the portions specified on the screen by the user with a mouse pointer and the like are switched to be displayed or not, and it takes a lot of man-hours to manually generate test questions. In (2), the fill-in-the-blank portions are instructed on the screen with a pen, and it takes a lot of man-hours since test questions are generated manually. In (3), only the portions specified on the screen by the user with a mouse pointer and the like are switched to be displayed or not, and it takes a lot of man-hours to generate test questions since the fill-in-the-blank portions are manually specified by the user. Also, in conventional fill-in-the-blank test question generation, although the fill-in-the-blank test questions can be automatically generated from a lecture material, suitable questions cannot be generated since fill-in-the-blank portions are generated from portions which is not considered as important by a lecturer. In other words, in (4), words with word-class information of personal names, place names and numeric characters are randomly selected from a text to automatically generate a question sentence, answer fields and right answers of fill-in-the-blank questions, and importance of fill-in-the-blank items considered by the lecturer is not determined. On the other hand, the applicant of the present invention has been developed an automatic generation technology for the content which synchronizes and regenerates on the web a video recording a lecture and a slide used in the lecture and a technology for automatically generating from a lecture video the content which regenerates on the web the laser-pointer information in a lecture using a laser pointer (Japanese Patent Application No. 2004-569359). In the web content in the form of using a lecture video, a lecturer usually spends more time describing an important portion during shooting of the lecture. If the important portion described for a longer time can be automatically extracted from the material used in the lecture, test questions can be automatically generated.